by Pete Hautman

About 30 years ago, publishers discovered that sending their authors on “book tours” was a good way to sell books. It wasn’t really a new idea—Mark Twain was an intrepid tourer—but it was not until the 1980s that touring became a standard publisher’s strategy for building an author’s “brand.” Booksellers loved it. Author appearances brought people into their stores—even authors nobody had ever heard of. The strategy worked. For a while.

By the turn of the millennium, the market had become completely saturated with authors driving, flying, or crawling from bookstore to bookstore—most of them on their own dime—desperately seeking an audience. A few years ago I did a signing at an independent bookstore in Chicago. I was disappointed when only three people showed up. The exhausted bookstore owner told me that mine was the 31st author signing they’d had in the store that month—and the month wasn’t over.

You have another author coming to the store to sign books? Yawn. Let me know when you book Justin Bieber.

Book marketing fads come and go. Other promotional fads (some of which are still going strong) include author newsletters, organized book clubs, contests, serialization in magazines and newspapers, websites, bookmarks, sample chapter pamphlets, billboards, postcards, infomercials, and the cocktail bashes organized by Jacqueline Susann back in the 1960s.

The hottest new bookselling tool today? The “book trailer.”

Book trailers are short videos, usually distributed via the Internet, designed to sell books. They are usually paid for by the author, produced by jobless freelancers, and very, very basic: zoom in on the book cover, add a few cheesy stock images and even cheesier stock music, use either a melodramatic voiceover or a series of typographical images asking “what if” questions. Here’s a typical example.

Okay, not exactly worthy of a Clio Award, but who says advertising has to be “good” to be effective? Not me, Jack. But here’s the problem: nobody knows whether book trailers—good or not so good—actually sell books.

Analyzing the numbers seems simple on the surface. If you spend $1,000 on a trailer, and your book is published in, say, trade paperback, to recoup your investment you must sell approximately 1,000 books that you would otherwise not have sold without the trailer.

So, you make a trailer, then sell X number of books. Did it work? There is no way to know. It’s not as if you can distribute the trailer regionally and track book sales accordingly. It’s more like you throw a coin in a well, then sit back and wait to see whether your life gets better.

But maybe your trailer will be viewed by, say, Oprah Winfrey’s niece. She runs out and buys your book. She loves it! She mentions it to her aunt, and Oprah loves it too and . . .

It could happen. If Oprah had a niece. Maybe she does. I don’t know.

In a somewhat more likely scenario, your trailer is viewed by 138 people on YouTube. Twenty-two of them have already read the book, so they looked you up and came across the video. Six are high school students who have a book report due on Monday and want to avoid reading your book. One hundred and nine are automated web bots mining random websites for Social Security numbers. The last one is your mom.

What to do? If you think it might be a fun project, make a trailer. If you are deathly afraid of being left out, make a trailer. If your writing isn’t going well and you have nothing better to do, make a trailer.

That’s what I did.

Pete Hautman is the author of more than 20 novels for adults and teens, including the 2004 National Book Award winner Godless, and three New York Times Notable Books: Drawing Dead, The Mortal Nuts, and Rash.

Hautman is known in adult fiction for his poker-themed novels (Drawing Dead, Short Money, The Mortal Nuts, Ring Game, and The Prop) as well as several other crime novels.

His young adult and middle-grade novels range from science fiction (Rash, Mr. Was, and Hole in the Sky) to mystery (“The Bloodwater Mysteries” and Blank Confession) to contemporary drama (Godless, Sweetblood, How to Steal a Car, and others).

With novelist, poet, and occasional coauthor Mary Logue, Hautman divides his time between Golden Valley, Minnesota, and Stockholm, Wisconsin. His latest books are Blank Confession (November, 2010) and The Big Crunch (January, 2011).

Learn more about Pete Hautman on his website: www.petehautman.com